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From the U.S. Library of Congress website:
“Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:
To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and
In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.”
In other words, copyrights give you legal
protection from someone else using your original work without
your permission.
You can go to the LOC website and for $35 register your copyrighted work. Expect that process to take many months.
Is it worth it? That’s the big question and unless you are a big time author, the answer is probably not.
Most ebook authors and writers choose to not register copyrights for two reasons:
- The cost of lawyers to pursue protection is very expensive.
- You can gain the same basic protection by placing a simple sentence in your work at no cost to you.
One must ask, and be honest, what is the true value of this work? How would it impact me if it were plagiarized or stolen? Is there a realistic chance of selling it one day? Is there a chance of its value being higher a day in the future than it is today?
Let's face it: the cost of hiring lawyers to help enforce our ebook copyrights and try to gain some type of compensation for violation of those copyrights, are just too expensive for most of us.
For MOST people, the answers to these questions lead us to simply put a notice on our work that it is “Copyright 2002 by Knowledge Download” and know that we have all the legal protection that we need with that simple statement.
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